At Obamacare-Abortion Line, Common Ground's Gone

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TAMPA, Fla. — The Celebration of Pro-Life Women Leaders is held above the local Hooters, which makes some kind of perfect sense. To get to the America they want to create, you have to walk through the America they want to change.

Michele Bachmann was in great form. "We are here because we are lovers of life," she began. "We are made in the image and likeliness of a holy God. It's an immutable truth, and one thing we know about truth is that it is written in the chords of our heart and that rings true to people — and that's why all the years and years of propaganda from high-school classrooms or college classrooms and Hollywood film or any other form of media cannot deny the truth that at the center of life is life itself."

Bachmann delivered these ringing lines perfectly. She sounded sincere, sensitive and firm, maternal and strong. She went on to tell the story of picking up her first foster child at a homeless shelter and her thin little dress and shoes two-and-a-half sizes too small. "Our hearts were broken for her, so we took another and another and another until we'd taken 23 foster children into our home. It wasn't a lot, but it was what we could do. That's all God asks of all of us — what can we do."

I'm not going to make fun of this. The woman raised 23 foster children. That's an astonishingly wonderful thing to do. And the genuine passion she showed for this moral issue is doubly impressive when you see how effective she is as a politician. She could be a real player if she moderated her views.

Then the sweetness disappeared in the fire of an avenging angel. Obama is "the most anti-woman anti-life president ever in the history of the United States.... The president's health-care plan is the most anti-woman piece of legislation and the most pro-abortion piece of legislation. For the first time in our country we have taxpayer-subsidized abortion and the denial of religious liberty. You see, we no longer elect a president, we elect a health-care dictator!"

After the standing ovation — about 100 people attended the event, where Senator Kelly Ayotte and Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi also spoke very effectively — I tried to get some perspective from Lisa Huetteman, a pro-life supporter from Tampa. She was friendly and seemed like a very decent person, so I asked her to explain how Obamacare is pro-abortion when it doesn't actually pay for abortions.

Four things, she said.

1. The law "requires that any drug that is approved by the FDA be provided by any health-care insurance company. Those drugs include Ella and the morning-after pill. Those drugs are abortofacients. They kill the child after it has already been conceived."

2. The law requires insurance companies for sterilization, she said. "I am paying for something that I believe to be morally wrong."

3. "There's a fine-print thing that says you can opt out of abortion coverage — well, if you don't know to opt out, then you are paying for abortion coverage."

4. "Then there's the other piece of how much taxpayer funding that goes to Planned Parenthood."

The morning-after pill, I get. If you're absolute on life beginning at conception, you want to get rid of that. But that became legal in a long process that had nothing to do with Obama. And Planned Parenthood was founded in 1917. Presidents both Republican and Democrat have allowed the government to fund it. Reagan didn't stop it. Bush didn't stop it. Romney and Ryan probably won't be able to stop it either, if only because of the slowness of democracy and the legal system. But Bachmann made it sound like Obama is advocating and pushing abortions and morning-after pills. That just seems so grossly unfair. It takes this great moral problem in which sincere people can differ and reduces it to frothing at the political mouth.

As the interview continued, common ground seemed more and more impossible to find:

ESQUIRE.COM: It seems to me that abortion is legal and it's pretty much split down the country, and a president who is going to be the president of all the people has to...

LISA HUETTEMAN: It is legal, but that doesn't make it morally right. He has expanded the taxpayer paying of it, through Obamacare and through his support and funding of Planned Parenthood — an evil, evil organization.

ESQ: Here's something I don't understand. In some Latin American countries, they have prison sentences for women who have abortions. In El Salvador, it's 20 years or something like that. How are you going to actually deal with this if you make it illegal?

LH: It's morally wrong.

ESQ: But are you going to put women in prison? If it's murder...

LH: No, it's just like prostitution. Most of the women involved in prostitution, they aren't the criminals.

ESQ: So what do you want?

LH: I want morality brought back into our country.

ESQ: But if it's illegal, it's going to be illegal.

LH: There's a mentality in this country that if it's legal, it's right and its not...

ESQ: But what will the penalty be? Will you put women in jail?

LH: It's the doctors who perform it, not the women — women are the victims in this.

LH: How many times have you been outside an abortion clinic where the boyfriend is the one making the woman do it?

ESQ: You're suggesting these women are passive victims. That doesn't make sense to me.

LH: They are victims of something that is being promoted as being okay. The logical argument is this selfishness that says, "My life is more important than yours." It doesn't work that way. God created us to carry children.

ESQ: But let's just talk about one woman who makes the choice. You know, some people use coat hangers or jump down the stairs, there's not always a doctor involved.

LH: If we could make adoption viewed as a valid alternative, if you could promote adoption — we have women going to China to adopt children because our laws make it so difficult to adopt. Why is that happening? We demonize adoption, like, "What kind of a mother are you to give your child up?" Part of this is symptomatic of bigger problems — marriage has been totally disintegrated. You start with divorce."

ESQ: But aren't these individual choices? It's your choice to get divorced.

LH: What you're telling me is that because people fail, I should lower the bar. Do I believe marriages are difficult? Yes. But if you can get out any time, maybe you're not looking at how you can improve yourself as a person.

ESQ: Do you want to make divorce illegal?

LH: No, these are all symptomatic things. When marriage, a lifelong commitment between a man and woman, the place where children are conceived, when you take away from that where sex is for entertainment and not for the purpose of creation — these are all symptoms of a bigger issue. So now you have 47 percent of children being born to single mothers. Do you think that's optimal?

ESQ: But that's a person's inner spiritual life.

LH: These are all intertwined.

ESQ: I was in communist China recently, they have billboards that say "behave" and "be good" and "clean the streets." In America, we're left to make our own decisions.

LH: I believe fundamentally there is a right and wrong and those rights are defined for us by our creator.

ESQ: But what about people in America who don't agree with you? Do you want to impose your ideas on them?

LH: They are imposing them on me.

ESQ: They're not forcing you to get an abortion.

LH: They are forcing me to pay for something I believe is morally wrong. They're saying if you don't perform an abortion under this new health care law doctors will not be able to have their jobs, justices of the peace. They're forcing their immorality on people who are moral. That's the problem all these things are related. The demise of culture, relativism, if its right for me let it be. It's not right. You can feel good about yourself and say I'm not hurting anybody — you're killing a baby, you're killing a person.

ESQ: If they changed the health care law so nobody was forced to do anything that you disagree with, would you still be opposed to it?

LH: Here's what I believe in — I believe in the free markets. The free markets allow people to support organization they agree with.

ESQ: But you want to change the law and make abortion illegal.

LH: Yes.

ESQ: So people won't be free to support the organizations they believe in, not if they're Planned Parenthood.

LH: That's right — you know why, because those babies are not free. If I say, I don't like you and you're in my way so I'll eliminate you.

ESQ: Please don't do that.

LH: Exactly. I respect you. I'm saying that that being, a being that is the size of this — (she holds her fingers a smidge apart) — has a right to live, and the mother made her choice when they decided to have sex, and the purpose of sex is procreation — like it or not, that's what God said, and if you don't believe in God, that's another conversation.